Biography

Italian architect, and writer on architecture, part of a family of artists. They were originally from the Valtellina region of Lombardy. Later members included two architects active mainly in the Veneto: Giandomenico Scamozzi (1526-1582), originally from the province of Sondrio, who emigrated in 1546 to Vicenza, aged 20, and obtained citizenship by 1570, and his more famous son Vincenzo Scamozzi, born in Vicenza in 1548 and who c. 1580 moved to Venice, where he lived until his death in 1616.

Vincenzo Scamozzi was perhaps the most important figure there between Andrea Palladio, whose unfinished projects he inherited at Palladio's death in 1580, and Baldassarre Longhena, Scamozzi's only pupil. Palladio's great public project that Scamozzi inherited early in the process of construction was the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, which Palladio had designed in the last months of his life.

His father was Scamozzi's first teacher, imbuing him with the principles of Sebastiano Serlio, laid out in Serlio's book. Vincenzo visited Rome in 1579-1580, and then moved to Venice in 1581, where he had been invited to design the Procuratie Nuove on the Piazza San Marco itself. In 1600 he visited France and left a sketchbook record of his impressions of French architecture.

Scamozzi's influence spread far beyond his Italian commissions through his treatise, L'Idea dell'Architettura Universale (The Idea of Universal Architecture), which is the last of the Renaissance works on the theory of architecture. It was published with woodcut illustrations at Venice in 1615.